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Nostalgia and the Off-Modern Swerve

From “a hypochondria of the heart” to the off-modern mindset

Text by Svetlana Boym

Photography by Svetlana Boym

My book The Future of Nostalgia came out on the eve of 9/11 and I thoughtthat in the new climate the discussionof nostalgia would quickly become obsolete. For better and for worse, nostalgia survived and returned with a vengeance. We (or at least, I) hoped against hope that the future will be endlessly receding like the horizon and we will be able to reflect on our nostalgias critically and affectionately and finally reconquer our present. The ultimate object of nostalgia is afterall that place in time where you don'tfeel nostalgic for anything. This object remains forever elusive.

Nostalgia has not been discarded likethe old version of Netscape. If in the optimistic 1990s, nostalgia seemed to be an exotic and eccentric topic of research, in the 2000s it became a cultural mainstream. The first decade of the 21st century started with the acts of terror and subsequent wars on terror that evoked medieval antinomies between cultures.It ended with the economic crisis that shook the belief in the relentless development and its destructive derivates. Nostalgic transformations occur over long durations of time and are not driven by the market race for the newest apps, however retro or radical chic they appear to be. Nostalgic symptoms point at long-term cultural scars for which we have many sedatives but no cure. In other words, what is most surprising for me about that the future of nostalgia ten years after the book's publication is that it is pretty much what it used to be.

I will retrace the zigzag route from the reflection on nostalgia to the examination of public freedom and propose the conception of the off-modern that best describes our current experiences of modernity out-of synch.

Nostalgia andits DiscontentsThe word "nostalgia" comes from two Greek roots, nostos - return home - and algia - longing. I would define it as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images - of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we tryto force it into a single image, it breaksthe frame or burns the surface.

It would not occur to us to demand a prescription for nostalgia. Yet in the 17th century, nostalgia was considered to be a curable disease, akin to a severe common cold. Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a journey to the Swiss Alps would take care of nostalgic symptoms. The word nostalgia, in spite of its Greek roots, did not originate in ancient Greece. "Nostalgia" is only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek. The word was coined by an ambitious Swiss student, Johannes Hofer, in his medical dissertation in1688.1 Hofer also suggested "nosomania" and "philopatridomania" to describe thesame symptoms. Luckily, the latter failed to enter common parlance. Contrary to our intuition, nostalgia came from medicine, not from poetry or politics. Among the first victims of the newly diagnosed disease were various displaced peopleof the 17th century: freedom-loving students from the Republic of Berne studying in Basel, domestic help and servants working in France and Germany, and Swiss soldiers fighting abroad. The epidemic of nostalgia was accompanied by an even more dangerous epidemicof "feigned nostalgia," particularlyamong soldiers tired of serving abroad, revealing the contagious nature of"erroneous representations" and"afflicted imagination".

The nostalgia that interests me here isnot merely an individual sickness but a symptom of our age, a historical emotion. Hence I will make three crucial points. First, nostalgia in my diagnosis is not "anti-modern". It is not necessarily opposed to modernity but coeval withit. Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: doubles and mirror images of one another. Nostalgia is not merely an expression of local longing, but a resultof a new understanding of time and space that made the division into "local" and "universal" possible.

Second, nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place but actually it is a yearningfor a different time - the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgiais rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress.The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition. Hence the "past of nostalgia", to paraphrase Faulkner,is not "even the past".It could merely be better time, or slower time. Time out of time, unencumbered by appointment books.

Third, nostalgia, in my view, is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well. The fantasies of the past determined by the needs of the present have a direct impact on the realities of the future. The consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales. Unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory. While futuristic utopias might be out of fashion, nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes it is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and space.

Historians often consider nostalgia to be a bad word, an affectionate insult, at best. "Nostalgia is to memory as kitsch is to art," writes Charles Maier.2 The word "nostalgia" is frequently used dismissively. "Nostalgia... is essentially history without guilt. Heritage is something that suffuses us with pride rather than with shame," writes Michael Kammen.3 Nostalgia in this sense is an abdication of personal responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming, an ethical and aesthetic failure. Nostalgia produces subjective visions of "afflicted imagination" that tend to colonise the realm of politics, history and everyday perception.

Modern nostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that the universality of longing can make us more empathetic towards fellow humans, yet the moment we try to repair longing with a particular belonging, the apprehension of loss with a rediscoveryof identity and especially of a national community and unique and pure homeland, we often part ways and put an endto mutual understanding. Algia - longing - is what we share, yet nostos (the return home) is what divides us. It is the promise to rebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many powerful ideologies of today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflected nostalgia breeds monsters. Yet the sentiment itself, the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, is at the verycore of the modern condition.

The ambivalent sentiment permeates 20th-century popular culture where technological advances and special effects are frequently used to recreate visions of the past, from the sinking Titanic to dying gladiators and extinct dinosaurs. While making a claim of a pure and clean homeland, nostalgic politics often produces a mixed "glocal" hybrid of capitalism and religious fundamentalism, or of corporate state and Eurasian patriotism. The mixof nostalgia and politics can be explosive.

In the good old days, nostalgia was a curable disease, dangerous but not always lethal. Leeches, warm hypnotic emulsions, opium and a return to the Alps usually soothed the symptoms. Purgingof the stomach was also recommended, but nothing compared to the return tothe motherland that was believed to be the best remedy for nostalgia.

As a public epidemic, nostalgia was based on a sense of loss not limited to personal history. Such a sense of loss does not necessarily suggest that what is lost is properly remembered and that one still knows where to look for it. Nostalgia became less and less curable. By the endof the 18th century, doctors discovered that a return home did not always treat the symptoms. In fact, once at home,the patients often died. The object of longing occasionally migrated to faraway lands beyond the confines of the motherland. Just as today's genetic researchers hope to identify a gene both for medical conditions, social behaviour and even sexual orientation, so the doctors in the 18th and 19th century looked for a single cause, for one "pathological bone". Yet they failed to find the locus of nostalgia in their patient's mind or body. One doctor claimed that nostalgia was a "hypochondria of the heart" that thrives on its symptoms. From a treatable sickness, nostalgia had turned into an incurable disease. A provincial ailment, maladie du pays had turned into a disease of the modern age, mal du siècle.

My hypothesis is that the spread of nostalgia had to do not only with dislocation in space but rather with the changing conception of time.4 Nostalgia was diagnosed at a time when art and science had not yet entirely severed their umbilical ties and when the mind and body - internal and external wellbeing - were treated together. This was a diagnosis of a poetic science. And we should not smile condescendingly upon the diligent Swiss doctors. Our progeny might poeticise depression and see it as a metaphor for a global atmospheric condition, immune to treatment with Prozac. Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an "enchanted world" with clear borders and values. It could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, for a home that is both physical and spiritual, for the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addressee. Encountering silence, he looks for memorable signs, desperately misreading them. In response to Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the universality of reason, romantics began to celebrate the particularism of the sentiment. Longing for home became a central trope of "romantic nationalism".v It is not surprising that national awareness comes from outside the community rather than from within.5 The nostalgic is never a native but a dis-placed person who mediates between the local and the universal. Many national languages, thanks to Herder's passionate rehabilitation, discovered their own par-ticular expression for patriotic longing. Curiously, intellectuals and poets from different national traditions began to claim that they had a special word for homesickness that was radically untranslatable. The Portuguese have their saudade, Russians, their toska, Czechs lítost, Romanians, dor. To say nothing of heimweh and mal de corazon. All those untranslatable words of national uniqueness have proved to be synonyms of the same historical emotion. While the details and flavours differ, the grammar of romantic nostalgias all over the world is quite similar.7 "I long therefore I am" was the romantic motto. By the 21st century, the passing ailment had turned into the incurable modern condition.

Instead of a magic cure for nostalgia,I will offer a typology that might illuminate some of nostalgia's mechanisms of seduction and manipulation. I distinguishbetween two main types of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos ("home") and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming - wistfully, ironically, desperately. These distinctions are not absolute binaries, and one can surely make a more refined mapping ofthe grey areas on the outskirts of imaginary homelands. I wanted to identifymain tendencies and narrative structures in "plotting" nostalgia, in making senseof one's longing and loss. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself asnostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.

Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals.It knows two main plots - the returnto origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many placesat once and imagining different time zones. It loves details, not symbols. At best, it can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias. This typology of nostalgia allows me to distinguish between national memory that is based on a single version of national identity and social memory, which consists of collective frameworks that mark but do not define the individual memory. The rhetoric of restorative nostalgia is not about the "past" but rather about universal values, family, nature, homeland, truth. The rhetoric of reflective nostalgia is about taking time out of time and about grasping the fleeing present. Restoration (from re-staure - ie re-establish) signifiesa return to the original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment. While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one homeland with paranoiac determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion. Instead of recreation of the lost home, reflective nostalgia can foster a creation of aesthetic individuality. Home, after all, is not a gated community. Paradise on earth might turn out to be another Potemkin village with no exit.

Reflective nostalgia is concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude. Re-flection means new flexibility, not the re-establishment of stasis. The focus here is not on the recovery of whatis perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and the passage of time. To paraphrase Nabokov, these types of nostalgia are often "amateursof Time, epicures of duration", who resistthe pressure of external efficiency and take sensual delight in the texture of time not measurable by clocks and calendars.8 If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialise time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalises space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection.

Reflective nostalgia does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home; it is "enamoured of distance, not of the referent itself".9 This type of nostalgic narrative is ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary. It is precisely this defamiliarisation and sense of distance that drives them to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present and future. The past is not made in the image of the present or seen as foreboding of some present disaster. Rather, the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, non-teleological possibilities of historic development. We don't need a computer to get access to the virtualities of our imagination: reflective nostalgia has been opening up multiple planes of consciousness.10

In the 21st century, millions of people find themselves displaced from their place of birth, living in voluntary or involuntary exile. Immigrant stories are the best narratives of nostalgia - not only because they suffer through it but because they challenge it. They are often framed as projections for nostalgias of the others who speak from a much safer place. Immigrants understand limitations of nostalgia and the tenderness of what I call "diasporic intimacy" that cherishes non native, elective affinities.11 "Diasporic intimacy" is not opposed to uprootedness and defamiliarisation but is constituted by it. So much has been made of the happy homecoming that it is time to do justice to the stories of non-return and the reluctant praise of exile. Non-return home, in the case of some exiled writers and artists, turns into a central artistic drive. A homemaking in the text and artwork, as well as a strategy of survival. Ordinary exiles too often become artists in life who remake themselves and their second homes with great ingenuity. Inability to return home is both a personal tragedy and an enabling force. That doesn't mean that there is no nostalgia there, only that this kind of nostalgia precludes the restoration of the past. Diasporic intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion, but only a precarious affection - no less deep, while aware of its transience.

This reflection on immigrant solidarity and diasporic intimacy as well as my own bicultural (that is at least bi-cultural) identity and an unsettling existence inthe many hats of a theorist, writer, media artist in contemporary moment led to seek an unconventional exist from the nostalgic paradigm into exploration of the off-modern.

The Off-Modern TurnThe 21st century cannot look for refugein either utopias of unending development nor in nostalgic restorations. There is something preposterous in our contemporary moment of post-industrial economic crisis and pre-industrial cultural conflicts. This is not a conflict between modern and anti-modern, or a pure "clash of cultures", but rather as a clash of eccentric modernities that are out-of-synch with each other both temporally and spatially. Multiple projects of globalisations and glocalisations overlap but don't coincide. Together with the expansion of the cyberspace, we witness the reemergence of the public place, often an urban environment that becomes a material locus for new social justice movements and cross-cultural solidarities beyond digital friending. In this context of conflicting and intertwined pluralities, the prefix "post" is passé. Unlike the thinkers of the last fin de siècle, we neither mourn nor celebrate the ends of history, art or critical thinking. Post-modernism has been buried in the zero decade of the 21st century together with other spectacular cultural derivatives while we continue to cohabit with our ruins and ghosts.

So what if we follow a swerve? Instead of fast-changing prepositions - "post," "anti", "neo", "trans" and "sub" - that all suggest an implacable movement forward, against or beyond, and try desperately to be "in", I propose to go off: "Off" as in "off kilter", off Broadway, "off the path" or "way off". Off-brand, off the wall and occasionally "off-colour". "Off modern" is a detour into the unexplored potentials of the modern project. It recovers unforeseen pasts and ventures into the side alleys of modern history at the margins of error of major philosophical, economic and technological narratives of modernisation and progress. It opens into the modernity of "what if", and not only postindustrial modernisation as it was.

After the major revolution of the 20th century, modern theorist and writer Victor Shklovsky proposed to explore the knight's move in the game of chess which traces "the tortured road of the brave", and not the master-slave dialectics of "dutiful pawns and kings".12 Oblique, diagonal and zigzag moves reveal the play of human freedom vis-à-vis political teleologies and ideologies that follow suprahuman laws of the invisible hand of the market or of the march of progress. Like his contemporaries, Victor Shklovsky was fascinated by modernist science, from Einstein's theory of relativity, to the quantum and wave theories of light and Nikolai Lobachevsky's conception of a non-Euclidian geometry that does not accept the central axiom claiming that parallel lines cannot meet. In the words of Vladimir Nabokov: "if the parallel lines do not meet, it is not because meet they cannot, but because they have other things to do."13

The preposition "off" is a product of linguistic error, popular etymology and fuzzy logic. It developed from the preposition "of", with the addition of an extra"f", an emphatic and humorous onomatopoeic exaggeration that imitates oral speech. "Off" suggests a dimension oftime and human action that is unusualor potentially offputting. It either describes something too spontaneous (off-the cuff, off-handed, off-the record) or too edgy (off-the wall), verging on the obscene (off-colour) or not in synch with the pace (offbeat). Sometimes "off" is about embarrassment of life caught unawares. It is extemporaneous and humane. The "off" in "off modern" designates both the belonging to the critical project of modernity and its edgy excess. Most importantly, it is not a marker of margins but a delimitation of a broad space for a new choreography of the future possibilities. Off modern is not anti-modern; it is closer, in fact, to the critical and experimental spirit of modernity than it is to the existing forms of industrial and post-industrial modernisation.

In the 21st century, modernity is our antiquity. We live with its ruins, whichwe incorporate into our present, leaving deliberate scars or disguising our age marks with the uplifting cream of oblivion. Off modern is not a lost "ism" from the ruined archive of the avant-garde, but a prism of vision and a mode of acting and creating in the world. It is a contemporary worldview and a form of historic sensibility which allows us to recaptureeccentric aspects of earlier modernities, to"brush history against the grain," to use Walter Benjamin's expression, in order to understand the preposterous aspects of our present. The off-modern project is still off-brand; it is a performance-in-progress, at once contemporary and offbeat vis-à-vis the present moment.

Off modern does not suggest a continuous history from antiquity to modernity to postmodernity, and so on. Instead it con-fronts the breaks in tradition, the loss of common yardsticks and disorientations that occur in almost every generation. Off modern acknowledges the syncope and the offbeat movements of history that were written out from its dominant versions edited by the victors, who cared little about the dignity of the defeated. Off-modern reflection does not merely try to colour the blank spots of history green or red, thus curing longing with belonging. Rather, it veers off the beaten track of dominant constructions of history, proceeding laterally, not literally to discover the missed opportunities and roads not taken.

Off modern is a part of a contemporary cultural and artistic reflection on "unfinished modernities". Yet unlike the "altermodern", the term proposed by writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud in 2009, the off modern does not define itself merely as a new modernity "reconfigured to an age of globalisation, […] a new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing."The off-moderns are not "early adapters" to the existing gadgets of posthistorical globalisation or internet technology;they search for experimental platforms that would connect public squares ofthe world with the digital humanitiesof the future and for which no gadgets have been invented yet.

To some extent, the theory of the alter-modern still followed post Marxist post post-postmodern logic while off modern offsets this way of post-historical thinking with the swerve and the knight's move that opens into alternative genealogies and conjectural histories of modernities. Instead of subtitled and translated languages of the new universalism, off-moderns focus on accents and affects, on the material singularities and alternative solidarities between cultures that often circumscribe the centre creating a broad margin for peripheral scenographies. The examples can be found in the long standing connections between Latin American, east European and Indian modernities that didn't always travel via Paris, London or Berlin where the metadiscourse to end all metadiscourses is perpetually enunciated, as if anew. Bourriaud opposed the "modernism of the 20th century which spoke the abstract language of the colonial west." Off-moderns don't subscribe to this such definition of modernism in the singular and don't give up the exploration of the peripheral artistic movements that often defied periodisations and typologies developing their own accented languages of estrangement, not abstraction, their eccentric forms of modernist humanism and public interventions that embarrass western art histories.

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Nostalgia, like globalisation, exists in the plural. The study of sociology, politics, ethnography of nostalgia, of its micro-practices and meganarratives, remainsas urgent as ever. It is always importantto ask the question: who is speaking inthe name of nostalgia? Who is its ventriloquist? Nostalgia reveals pluralities within cultures and not only external pluralisms. The mimetic desire for the nostalgias of the other goes beyond the east-west of Europe: often conscientious Europeans and Americans in their more or less genuine desire to understand the eastern "other" turn the dream of multiculturalism into a reverse exoticism. They exaggerate the otherness of the other, preserving nostalgic difference while disregarding differences within the foreign culture and its forms of political authoritarianism and media manipulation. Whether it's a matter of past grievances or present self-assertion, one always has to recognise the modernity of the other, the shared world of modern reinvented traditions and transnational individual dreams for reform and improvement. While the story that nostalgics tell is one of local homecoming, the form of that story is hardly local. Contemporary nostalgias can be understood as a seriesof migrating cross-cultural plots that go beyond national attachments.

After writing about nostalgia, I wanted to think of the existential space that was not a space of memory or longing but of the adventure in the uncertain and the unpredictable in both public and private realm which resulted in my last book, Another Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2010). In 2003-4 when I started working on this project, writing on public freedom seemed as eccentric as exploring nostalgia in the optimistic decade of the 1990s. Last year, with its major public protests from Cairo to Moscow to New York and Madrid seemed to "brush history against the grain" and hark back to the protests of 1968 and 1989, reviving the forgotten histories of public dissent and alternative cross-cultural solidarities. Thus the prospective dimensions of nostalgia became inspiring for the alternative conceptions of public freedom and off-modern solidarity.

In conclusion, there is not much that is new about contemporary nostalgia circa 2012. In fact, the word "contemporary", used first in the current sense in 1633, is 50 years older than the word "nostalgia", invented in 1688. At the end, the only antidote for the dictatorship of nostalgia might be nostalgic dissidence, a combination of nostalgia and a swerve of freedom.

The off-modern project of today - that we already eye with anticipatory nostalgia from the hindsight of some potentially dystopian future - proposes to follow this mysterious swerve. Hopefully it would allow us to reflect on the prospective rather than retrospective dimensionsof nostalgia and to examine histories of what if, roads not taken and technologies that didn't lead to the creation of the corporate giants of the Silicon Valley. Creative new media does not have to be driven solely by the existing technologies but also by estranging artistic techniques that reflect on the frameworks of technology itself. It can result in the organisation of the alternative platforms for knowledge and experience. Neither hyper nor cyber but another prefix that hasn't been fixed yet. §

i Hofer's "Dissertatio medica de nostalgia", Basel 1688. English trans. by Carolyn Kiser Anspach in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Baltimore, II (1934). For the history of nostalgia see Jean Starobinski, "The Idea of Nostalgia" in Diogenes 54 (1966), pp. 81-103, Fritz Ernst, Vom Heimweh (Zurich: 1949) and George Rosen, "Nostalgia: A Forgotten Psychological Disorder" in Clio Medica, Vol. 10, No 1, pp. 28-51 (1975). For psychological and psychoanalytic approaches to nostalgia, see James Phillips, "Distance, Absence and Nostalgia" in Descriptions, eds: Don Ihde & Hugh J. Silverman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), "Nostalgia: A Descriptive and Comparative Study," in Journal of Genetic Psychology 62 (1943), pp. 97-104, Roderick Peters, "Reflections on the Origin and Aim of Nostalgia", Journal of Analytic Psychology 30 (1985), pp. 135-148. For a study of the sociology of nostalgia, see Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: The Free Press, 1979).

2 Charles Maier, "The End of Longing? Notes Towards A History of Postwar German National Longing". Presented at the Berkeley Center for German and European Studies, December 1995.

3 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory (Vintage: 1991), p. 688.

4 Jean Starobinski, "The Idea of Nostalgia" p. 81.

5 Johan Gottfried von Herder, Correspondence on Ossian in The Rise of Modern Mythology, pp. 229-230.